No Child Left Behind: What Would Al Say?

Albert Shanker, the legendary president
of the American Federation of
Teachers, was a founding father of the
modern movement for standards-based
education reform in the United States.
Beginning in the late 1980s, until his death
in 1997, Shanker was the most visible
spokesman for creating a coherent system of
education standards, testing, and accountability
that eventually evolved into the No Child
Left Behind Act of 2001. Shanker’s untimely
death raises the question: What would the father
have thought of his orphaned child?

No one can say for sure, but having spent
the past several years researching and writing
a biography of Shanker, I believe he would
have backed the basic thrust of No Child Left
Behind—greater resources in return for
greater accountability—but would have
fought to change several of the federal law’s
deviations from his original vision for standards-based reform.

Albert Shanker, then the
president of New York City’s
United Federation of Teachers,
answers questions during a
press conference in 1968.—File photo by Bob Gomel/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Today, the education standards movement—the call for educators to clearly outline
content standards of what students
should know, to test them to see how well
they know it, and to make students and
adults accountable for failure—dominates
the American education policy landscape, but
this was not always the case. For years, the
United States was the outlier in the world,
resisting standards, assessments, and consequences.
Then, in the years following publication
of the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, a
group of academics, including Marshall S.
Smith, Diane Ravitch, and Chester E. Finn
Jr., along with governors and business leaders
from outside the world of education,
sought to have states adopt standards-based
reform. While most of the education establishment
initially fought the effort, reformers
found a surprising ally—indeed, a leader—in
Al Shanker.

Shanker argued that there
was a big hole at the center of
American education: the lack
of agreement on what skills
and knowledge students
should master. Teachers had
textbooks but no real guidance
on what to prioritize, so
they ended up choosing very
different topics to pursue, based on personal interests,
creating incoherence and confusion. And there
was little outside pressure for anyone in the system
to work hard. As a former teacher, Shanker
often told others that when he gave homework or a
quiz, the class invariably shouted, “Does it count?”
For the small number of students applying to selective
colleges, grades mattered, but for the vast
majority attending nonselective institutions, or
going straight into the workforce, the truth was
that doing well academically didn’t matter much.

For Shanker, an
incentive structure that
excluded students made
no sense. Students, he
wrote, "are unlikely to
work harder when
they’ve been told that
if they don’t, their
teachers will be
punished."

Looking abroad, Shanker saw that many of
America’s competitors in Europe and Asia had systems
of standards, testing, and accountability that
were producing higher levels of achievement and
less inequality. The systems were coherent and
made life more predictable for both teachers and
students. Everyone knew in advance what was expected
of them, and the system turned teachers
and students from adversaries into allies. “It’s like
the Olympics,” Shanker said. “There’s an external
standard that students need to meet, and the
teacher is there to help the student make it.”

Many fellow educators worried that if standards
were set too high, producing high failure rates, it
would pave the way for school privatization. But
Shanker argued, to the contrary, that if public
schools weren’t reformed, a system of private
school vouchers was more likely to be
adopted. A system of standards, testing, and
accountability provided the right balance, he
argued; it would combine the incentives of
the private marketplace with democracy’s
need for education to have a public character.
Moreover, the American public would not
support greater funding of public education
without assurances of accountability.

Having said that, Shanker believed that
there were good and bad ways to implement
standards-based reform, and he raised serious
concerns with the predecessor legislation to
No Child Left Behind, President Clinton’s
1994 Improving America’s Schools Act. For one
thing, the original legislation set unrealistic
expectations, calling for “miraculous progress,”
Shanker said. It was ridiculous, he said, to expect
students achieving in the lowest quarter
to quickly become “equal to the best students
anywhere in the world.” Instead, multiple
standards should be set to move all parts of
the distribution upward, he argued. In addition,
Shanker objected to provisions in the
1994 law that placed all the sanctions on the
adults and none on students, the opposite of
what European systems did. “Imagine saying
we should shut down a hospital and fire its
staff because not all of its patients became
healthy—but never demanding that the patients
also look out for themselves by eating
properly, exercising, and laying off cigarettes,
alcohol, and drugs,” he argued.

Following Shanker’s death, then-Gov.
George W. Bush of Texas campaigned in
the 2000 presidential election for strong
standards and accountability reform in
education, and, on the stump, he frequently
quoted Shanker on the need for high standards.
Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act,
passed with broad bipartisan support, offered
the bargain that Shanker had championed—greater investment in K-12 public education
in return for increased accountability—but it
deviated substantially in the particulars from the
system Shanker envisioned:

Consequences for Students. The No Child Left Behind
Act provided consequences for schools and teachers (including the reconstitution of
failing schools), but no direct consequences
for students. A number of states
on their own have adopted student stakes,
but the law itself did not answer
Shanker’s basic question for children:
“Does it count?” For Shanker, an incentive
structure that excluded students made
no sense. Students, he wrote, “are unlikely
to work harder when they’ve been told
that if they don’t, their teachers will be
punished.”

Multiple Performance Standards. No Child
Left Behind set one standard for all American
students—100 percent are to be proficient
in math and reading by 2014—that’s precisely the type of unrealistic
goal to which Shanker objected. He predicted
that the result of a single standard
was either enormous failure rates, which
were designed to undermine public
schools and pave the way for privatization,
or a dumbed-down standard, which could
be achieved but would provide no challenge
to more-advanced students. He argued,
instead, for a European-style system,
which sets multiple standards so that
students at all academic levels have an incentive
to work hard and improve.

National Content Standards. Shanker
pushed for national standards and assessments.
“Should children in Alabama learn a
different kind of math or science from children
in New York?” he asked. After President
Bill Clinton proposed national reading
and math tests in his 1997 State of the
Union address, he telephoned Shanker, then
ailing from cancer, and acknowledged his intellectual
debt to the union leader. While the
No Child Left Behind Act asserts a new,
strong federal role in education, it largely
lets states set standards and assessments,
leaving in place the “50 different education
systems” that Shanker decried.

Quality Standards and Assessments.
Shanker called for a carefully planned system
of clearly articulated standards tied to
high-quality assessments. Indeed, the AFT
rated state standards for quality and published
examples of European assessments
that often called for open-ended, sophisticated
responses. But under NCLB, many
states have skipped over the difficult step of
providing clearly articulated standards to
guide teachers and students. Moreover, because
the law requires so much testing—every year for grades 3-8—many states have
employed commercial multiple-choice tests,
which are cheaper and quicker to administer.

Albert Shanker knew that getting standards-based reform right was going to be
very difficult, and in a 1993 forum in
Boston predicted it would take decades to
perfect. Today, many educators wish that
he had stayed around longer to help guide
the process.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century
Foundation, in Washington, is the author of Tough Liberal:
Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and
Democracy, just published by Columbia University Press.

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